art vs craft

Okay, there's a couple of posts I've made recently elsewhere that I've decided are actually pretty darn relevant to me; hence, duplication of content (oh, woe). They might even qualify as self-epiphanies. This one does, the other one... well, I'll think about that later.

For me, art is about taking risks with what's being made. So the utterly gorgeous cross-stitch I spent three years upon isn't art, and the sturdy reliable bookcase i'm eventually going to make (when we have room for such, which means when we have a house) won't be art. Neither of those two things require anything from me I can't do, and do well, and if they *did*, well, I could learn how to do it pretty easily, or just concentrate a little harder for that part.
Art, on the other hand, feels like jumping into the deep end of a pool when you aren't sure you can swim. So the livejournal icon i spent all of 5 minutes designing the other day was art, albeit not particularly good art in my opinion. If I made a cross-stitch from scratch, no pattern, and just let it take me where it went - yeah, that'd be art too.
Because if I already know where it's going when I start, and what I make is almost exclusively the expression of that initial impulse - that's just craft. Art has to have surprised me in the course of making it.

Of course, I don't really mean "just" craft. I'm a lot more pleased with the cross-stitch than I am with the livejournal icon, and I tend to value craft more than art in general, because risk-taking often leads to... well... things that are lame. But I definitely do make the distinction.

alone time

This one isn't really an epiphany, I suspect. More one of those supposed epiphanies that I actually re-have about every six months. A reminder, if you will.

Oh, I am the biggest freakazoid when it comes to this stuff.
Keirsey-sorter-wise, I come out exactly 50/50 on the introvert/extrovert thing, every time (i guess about 4) that I've taken the test. This seems accurate, but unfortunately it does NOT translate to a nice even keel balance sort of thing.

Hrm. I just tried to explain what it does translate to, but it came out all rambly and odd. So, I'm a split personality, married to an introvert, working a job where my primary responsibilities are all people-intensive. I have a pool from whence the energy for "job" and the energy for "social life" and the energy for "productive not-terribly-fun-endeavors" are all drawn, and there are actually a few ways to fill that pool back up:
1) huge doses of total alone time to do whatever the hell I want
2) a lot of extra physical contact of various sorts (anything from sleeping in with my husband for 2 or 3 mornings in a row to a couple of hours of roughhousing with a large dog)
3) very long, intimate, peaceful conversations with someone I feel safe around
4) reading aloud, either alone (which would fold into 1) or with someone

So, no, i don't *technically* need much alone time at all, if I'm getting a lot of 2, 3, and 4. But pragmatically speaking, alone time is a lot easier for me to insist on than the other 3 (as much as I love reading aloud with someone, for example, one can't exactly stomp up to one of one's friends and say, "You. Me. Yeats. 40 minutes. RIGHT NOW OR ELSE." (hee. that would be nice though.) )

Anyway, just like I have to fill the pool back up, I have also had problems with "floods" in the past.... I can get so I have too much energy and not enough social life/job/useful-and-boring-endeavors to expend it on. It's been *quite* some time since that was the case though.